Five on Friday - November 10, 2006

"The Boiling Cauldron from the Heritage Collection was a container when it was displayed on Origin - now it's not. What happened?"
The Origin display house had unfinished versions of the display items, and the cauldron was not intended to be a container. However, many people have requested that it be made into one, and it's relatively simple to do. But if we make it a container, it will require you to empty it out and re-deed it before you can customize your house (like the aquarium, elven containers, etc), so making it a container has some drawbacks. We're happy to go either way with this one, so we're asking your opinion - visit the poll on Stratics's forums here and vote!

"AAAAH! I still don't have my Veteran Rewards! My account age is STILL stuck!"
We've found the problem and we believe that we've corrected it - but the fix is not instant, and so you may see some account age weirdness over the next two weeks as all your characters get updated. Be patient just a little while longer, and you should be at the correct account age by 11/27/06 if not before.

As with all dates/times/weather reports, this is subject to change depending on our testing. This is our best guess given the information that we have at this time. Frankly, Sanya got a little too excited and jumped the gun when she gave the Stratics posters a date. But the programmer who gave her the information was just So Dreamy, she got distracted and didn't wait for the test run to finish out.

"Does the 9th Anniversary Collection include a sixth character slot?"
This was not explicitly stated on the 9th Anniversary page - sorry for any confusion. Upgrading to 9th Anniversary will entitle your account to a sixth character slot.

"When Age of Shadows was launched, we were told that the ban on placing Keeps and Castles was temporary. That was a long time ago - when can we place those house types in Malas?"
Quite frankly, I searched uo.com six ways to Sunday and couldn't find this ban listed specifically anywhere, so we had to look at the problem from the beginning. The purpose of the ban originally was, we assumed, to allow more players to place houses in Malas, rather than allow fewer players to place bigger houses. This still seems like a good idea, particularly because we are expecting new players to join the fun this spring with Kingdom Reborn. Also, people who were around for the launch of AoS searched their minds and hard drives, and found only evidence that Malas was intended to be mostly free of the large edifices. In fact, the only large houses in the area are promotional in nature.

So, for the foreseeable future, we're going to keep the housing rules on Malas as they have been: "Castles and keeps, which occupy large plots of land, cannot be built on Malas in order to make room for more housing slots, ensuring that all citizens of Sosaria have a fair chance at home ownership." This does not, of course, preclude us from changing our minds if at some point it makes sense to.

"This Halloween stuff is fun, but when are we going to get back to the storyline? I want to see Ricardo get what's coming to him!"
Patience, patience. The wheel of justice grinds slow but exceedingly fine. ;)

There's your Five on Friday! Also, to follow up on the question about German ordering information that we posted last week, check out Sanya's post about it here. Have a good weekend - I'm off to go hunt for the pumpkin with my name on it!

- Jeremy